Information
technology has always been closely linked to the way we learn. Part of the
learning process includes the reception of information -although education in the fullest
sense is a larger and more ambitious activity than simply informing. In
universities we favour the lecture as one of a number of methods of both
informing and teaching. It is interesting to note that the origins of the
lecture may lie in a response to the limitations of the manuscript and incunabulum
as a form of information technology. The lecture in a medieval university was a
way of coping with the paucity of materials with which to teach. Reading aloud to many studentsfunctioned
as an information-giving activity, a way of dictating from a single available
copy. The educational impact of the lecture was built on top on this, and has
lasted long after mass publication did away with the need for the lecturer to
make up for a lack of multiple copies by reading things out (though observers
of the shrivelled state of contemporary teaching collections in British
university libraries might well see the lecture assuming its ancient role once
more – the short loan librarian reading aloud to a mass of student
scribes perhaps?).

The
process of listening to the educational narrative of a lecture, taking written
notes of what is important and bearing in mind what is less so, thus developing
powers of concentration, discrimination and summary - these are all
intellectual benefits derived from a teaching medium that originated partly
from the limitations of a previous, undeveloped state of information
technology. Similarly, copying material from a short loan textbook and
re-presenting it in summary form as one’s own has earned a comparable
educational validity. The information technology of the quill pen or biro makes
this a slow process. The student has time to dwell on the material being
reproduced, analysing it and even adding notes, at the same time as they create
a surrogate for texts that cannot be personally owned. This thoughtful
reproduction of assimilated knowledge is not theft, it is education.

However,
as Nick Moore notes in his Internet column in this issue, the UK Joint
Information Systems Committee (JISC) has created a national information and
support service to aid the effort to stamp out plagiarism amongst students in
British universities. Essentially this service is a response to the impact of
information technology on learning – whereas in the past the paraphrasing
and restatement of received knowledge was a fairly acceptable part of
undergraduate and taught postgraduate coursework, this is now more problematic.
The ease with which large chunks of electronic text can be
copied and pasted into a word-processed essay or dissertation calls into
question an age-old learning activity. It makes the simple restatement
of knowledge a less than reliable demonstration of something having been learnt
by the student.

There are
a number of significant issues here for librarians and information professionals.
In particular, it is cheering to note that a powerful national policy-making
body like the JISC sees this as a problem for information managers, rather than
the preserve of educationalists or something related narrowly to academic
standards and progression. The UK National Plagiarism Advisory Service will be
run by information professionals, situated in the Information Management
Research Institute, part of the School for Informatics at NorthumbriaUniversity.
Yet again, the impact of information technology in education means that
information professionals must move beyond the sphere of simple information
provision and look at the use of the information provided. We have seen this
already, in the area of user education - we know that where students display no
more than mechanical information retrieval skills, we must now take
responsibility for such students’ learning needs and teach the
information literate use of the data they have retrieved. Similarly, in
the area of plagiarism, we now are expected to help distinguish between the
mechanical recycling of others’ intellectual property and the intelligent
rehearsing of received wisdom and knowledge. Yet again the advance of
information technology, rather than rendering library and information expertise
redundant, has created a new application for our skills and professionalism.

So far so good. However, discussions of the interrelationship between information,
information technology and education generally polarise at some point into two
camps, one traditional, the other progressive and technology-focussed. The
traditional camp would attack developments such as the derivative use of modern
electronic library services which enable students to draw together a multitude
of sources without the commitment, deliberation and thought of previous years.
Similarly, online lectures are dismissed because they lack the personal touch
of real human teaching. Plagiarism software, such as the ‘turnitin’ package purchased for the UK by JISC
might detect more ambitious fraud at higher levels of academic achievement. But
more modest early undergraduate efforts – which at best can be a
thoroughly acceptable procession of well-meant derivativeness – will now
be indistinguishable from plagiarism because of the ease with which facile
textual composites can be electronically assembled without any intellectual
effort. Plagiarism software is a doomed attempt to fight fire with fire –
a use of IT to limit the damage done to education by IT.

The
progressive argument is worth rehearsing as well. This philosophy would argue
that the effect of information technology on education has been to bring into
the foreground shallow learning and pedestrian achievement rather than cause
it. Educational and information technology now show how limited and undemanding
much traditional educational activity may have been in the past. If so much of
it can now be done by copying and pasting, how valuable was it in the first
place?Anyone who has delivered
user education lectures to a group of university students, whose presence was compelled less by the need to experience the personal
transmission of learning than desperation for a class ticket must question the
role of traditional lectures. Better to replace this ritual of ‘presentee-ism’ with online tutorials that can
reproduce the expository value of lectures without the charade of student
presence. Above all, online lectures can build in interactive exercises that
compel attention in the way that passive lecturing cannot. IT thus creates
higher standards than ever before. Plagiarism software is part of this raising
of standards: it detects derivative work that would have gone unnoticed
previously. Students will now consistently have to offer something that is
genuinely original for the first time in educational history

All such
discussions of education and information and communications technology are a
good thing because they make us think about the educational process and the
role of information within it.It
is important to note that the essential book on educational technology in
higher education during the 1990s was not entitled ‘Doing teaching with
technology’, but ‘RethinkingUniversity
teaching’ (Laurillard, 1993). The thinking
precedes the implementation of the method, regardless of its IT platform.

So what
does thinking about plagiarism technology help us discover about the role of
information in education? I would suggest that it helps us see that there is no
totally reliable evidential way of guaranteeing educational attainment. Both
the traditional and progressive cases above miss this point by arguing that
either a traditional or progressive approach to the use of information
technology gives a better guarantee of quality in higher education.

Perhaps
we should change tack and listen to novelist Martin Amis
describing the feeling of true educational attainment which he experienced as a
university student. Borrowing F.R Leavis’s
words, he spoke of the moment of ‘friction, the pregnant arrest’
that marked the discovery of literature for him, a self-confessed latecomer to
reading the classics. It was this discovery of the benefits of reading for
learning that meant his work had integrity (he did get a First after all).

Amis’s university education was good, because it was undertaken in good
faith. This faith in the act of reading for learning is best generated earlier
on in our educational career. This can be done with computers or it can be
achieved with age-old methods. It is something that parents with a commitment
to their child’s reading can cultivate, something which good
schoolteachers engender in their students, and something that librarians in
school and pubic libraries have been pursuing for years in their work to
encourage the reading habit. If you value the act of reading as an act of personal
enrichment and learning, then you will know why you are going to university.

The JISC
has spent £500,000 purchasing the ‘turnitin’
for the UK
university system. This is money well spent. But it is money that those
struggling to fulfil the reading and learning potential of young people earlier
on in the educational process will view with envy. If young people are taught
to read intelligently and discriminatingly as soon as possible in their
intellectual development, then the work that they produce later on in their
scholastic careers will have integrity. Clever software cannot guarantee such
integrity on its own. Equally essential is adequate resourcing
for school and public library collections and IT network infrastructure,
adequate resourcing for decent opening hours for
public libraries, and for good levels of well-trained staffing, so that
IT-literate librarians will have time to cultivate the reading habits of young,
inexperienced library users.

It is
good to see that information management specialists will be acting as part of
the general effort to guarantee quality and root out fraud in higher education.
But perhaps the real guarantors of quality are those who create a thirst for
reading, knowledge and thought prior to university. Without their work higher
education would be a void waiting for something to fill it. We should give
credit where credit is due – and with it, investment of resources also.

Nick
Joint

Editor

‘Library Review’.

Laurillard, D. (1993) Rethinking
university teaching: a framework for the effective use of educational
technology.London: Routledge